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OTHELLO.

I has been said that tragedy purifies the affections by terror and pity. That is, it substitutes imaginary sympathy for mere selfishness. It gives us a high and permanent interest, beyond ourselves, in humanity as such. It raises the great, the remote, and the possible to an equality with the little, the near, and the real. It makes man a partaker with his kind. It subdues and softens the stubbornness of his will. It teaches him that there are and have been others like himself, by showing him as in a glass what they have felt, thought, and done. It opens the chambers of the human heart. It leaves nothing indifferent to us that can affect our common nature. It excites our sensibility by exhibiting the passions wound up to the utmost pitch of the power of imagination or the temptation of circumstances; and corrects their fatal excesses in ourselves by pointing to the greater extent of sufferings and crimes to which they have led others. Tragedy creates a balance of the affections. It makes us thoughtful spectators in the lists of life. It is the refiner of the species; a discipline of humanity. The habitual study of poetry and works of imagination is one chief part of a wellgrounded education. A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman. Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.-OTHELLO furnishes an illustration of these remarks. It excites our sympathy in an extraordinary degree. The moral it conveys has a closer ap. plication to the concerns of human life than that of any other of

Shakspeare's plays. "It comes directly home to the bosoms and business of men." The pathos in Lear is indeed more dreadful and overpowering: but it is less natural, and less of every day's occurrence. We have not the same degree of sympathy with the passions described in Macbeth. The interest in Hamlet is more remote and reflex. That of OTHELLO is at once equally profound and affecting,

The picturesque contrasts of character in this play are almost as remarkable as the depth of the passion. The Moor Othello, the gentle Desdemona, the villain Iago, the good-natured Cassio, the fool Roderigo, present a range and variety of character as striking and palpable as that produced by the opposition of costume in a picture. Their distinguishing qualities stand out to the mind's eye, so that even when we are not thinking of their actions or sentiments, the idea of their persons is still as present to us as ever. These characters and the images they stamp upon the mind are the farthest asunder possible, the distance between them is immense: yet the compass of knowledge and invention which the poet has shown in embodying those extreme creations of his genius is only greater than the truth and felicity with which he has identified each character with itself, or blended their different qualities together in the same story. What a contrast the character of Othello forms to that of Iago: at the same time, the force of conception with which these two figures are opposed to each other is rendered still more intense by the complete consistency with which the traits of each char. acter are brought out in a state of the highest finishing. The making one black and the other white, the one unprincipled, the other unfortunate in the extreme, would have answered the common purposes of effect, and satisfied the ambition of an ordinary painter of character. Shakspeare has labored the finer shades of difference in both with as much care and skill as if he had had to depend on the execution alone for the success of his design. On the other hand, Desdemona and Æmilia are not meant to be opposed with anything like strong contrast to each other. Both are, to outward appearance, characters of common life, not more distinguished than women usually are, by difference of rank and situation. The diversity of their thoughts and senti

ments is however laid as open, their minds separated from each other by signs as plain and as little to be mistaken, as the complexions of their husbands.

The movement of the passion in Othello is exceedingly differ. ent from that of Macbeth. In Macbeth there is a violent struggle between opposite feelings, between ambition and the stings of conscience, almost from first to last: in Othello, the doubtful conflict between contrary passions, though dreadful, continues only for a short time, and the chief interest is excited by the alternate ascendency of different passions, the entire and unforeseen change from the fondest love and most unbounded confidence to the tortures of jealousy and the madness of hatred. The revenge of Othello, after it has once taken thorough posses sion of his mind, never quits it, but grows stronger and stronger at every moment of its delay. The nature of the Moor is noble, confiding, tender, and generous; but his blood is of the most inflammable kind; and being once roused by a sense of his wrongs, he is stopped by no considerations of remorse or pity till he has given a loose to all the dictates of his rage and his despair. It is in working his noble nature up to this extremity through rapid but gradual transitions, in raising passion to its height from the smallest beginnings and in spite of all obstacles, in painting the expiring conflict between love and hatred, tender. ness and resentment, jealousy and remorse, in unfolding the strength and weaknesses of our nature, in uniting sublimity of thought with the anguish of the keenest wo, in putting in motion the various impulses that agitate this our mortal being, and at last blending them in that noble tide of deep and sustained passion, impetuous but majestic, that "flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb," that Shakspeare has shown the mastery of his genius and of his power over the human heart. The third act of OTHELLO is his master-piece, not of knowledge or passion separately, but of the two combined; of the knowledge of char acter with the expression of passion, of consummate art in the keeping up of appearances with the profound workings of nature, and the convulsive movements of uncontrollable agony, of the power of inflicting torture and of sullering it. Not only is the tumult of passion heaved up from the very bottom of the soul, but

every the slightest undulation of feeling is seen on the surface as it arises from the impulses of imagination or the different probabilities maliciously suggested by Iago. The progressive preparation for the catastrophe is wonderfully managed from the Moor's first gallant recital of the story of his love, of "the spells and witchcraft he had used," from his unlooked-for and romantic success, the fond satisfaction with which he dotes on his own happiness, the unreserved tenderness of Desdemona and her innocent importunities in favor of Cassio, irritating the suspicions instilled into her husband's mind by the perfidy of lago, and rankling there to poison, till he loses all command of himself, and his rage can only be appeased by blood. She is introduced, just before Iago begins to put his scheme in practice, pleading for Cassio with all the thoughtless gaiety of friendship and winning confidence in the love of Othello.

"What! Michael Cassio?

That came a wooing with you, and so many a time,

When I have spoke of you dispraisingly,

Hath ta'en your part, to have so much to do

To bring him in?-Why this is not a boon:
"T is as I should entreat you wear your gloves,
Or feed on nourishing meats, or keep you warm;
Or sue to you to do a peculiar profit

To your person. Nay, when I have a suit,
Wherein I mean to touch your love indeed,

It shall be full of poise, and fearful to be granted.”

Othello's confidence, at first only staggered by broken hints and insinuations, recovers itself at sight of Desdemona; and he exclaims,

"If she be false, O then Heav'n mocks itself;
I'll not believe it."

But presently after, on brooding over his suspicions by himself, and yielding to his apprehensions of the worst, his smothered alousy breaks out into open fury, and he returns to demand sfaction of lago like a wild beast stung with the envenomed shaft of the hunters, "Look where he comes," &c. In this tate of exasperation and violence, after the first paroxysms of

M*

his grief and tenderness have had their vent in that passionate apostrophe, "I felt not Cassio's kisses on her lips," lago by false aspersions, and by presenting the most revolting images to his mind, easily turns the storm of passion from himself against Desdemona, and works him up into a trembling agony of doubt and fear, in which he abandons all his love and hopes in a breath.

"Now do I see 't is true. Look here, Iago,

All my fond love thus do I blow to Heav'n. 'Tis gone.
Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell;

Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne

To tyrannous hate! Swell, bosom, with thy fraught;
For 't is of aspics' tongues."

From this time, his raging thoughts “never look back, ne'er ebb to humble love," till his revenge is sure of its object, the painful regrets and involuntary recollections of past circum stances which cross his mind amidst the dim frances of passion, aggravating the sense of his wrongs, but not shaking his pur. pose. Once, indeed, where lago shows him Cassio with the handkerchief in his hand, and making sport (as he thinks) of his misfortunes, the intolerable bitterness of his feelings, the extreme sense of shame, makes him fall to praising her accom. plishments, and relapse into a momentary fit of weakness, "Yet the pity of it, lago!-O, Iago, the pity of it!" But this return. ing fondness only serves, as it is managed by lago, to whet his revenge, and set his heart more against her. In his conversa. tions with Desdemona, the persuasion of her guilt, and the immediate proofs of her duplicity seem to irritate his resentment and aversion to her; but in the scene immediately preceding her death, the recollection of his love returns upon him in all its tenderness and force; and after her death, he all at once forgets his wrongs in the sudden and irreparable sense of his loss :

**My wife' my wife what wife? I have no wife.

Où insupporta” je 1 ch heavy hour!"

See the passage beginning, “ It is impossible you should see this, were they as prime as goats," &c.

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